Aperio's commitment to digitizing pathology is evident in its legacy of innovation. Here we spotlight some of our underlying technology and the advances we've made to help transform the industry. See for yourself why Aperio is uniquely able to build turnkey solutions that specifically address your organization's pathology requirements.

Line Scanning for Rapid Entire-slide Capture

Aperio’s ScanScope® scanners are based on a patented (line) scanning method that has set a new standard for scanning performance and image quality. Learn more about why line scanning is superior to other image capture methods.

Entire-slide Image Analysis

The ability to efficiently apply image analysis algorithms to digital slides, without the need for expensive and dedicated computational power, is critically important to aiding pathologists and automating tedious tasks such as counting cells of interest. Aperio has pioneered capabilities to not only apply image analysis to entire slides, but to automate the process, which paves the way for future applications of digital pathology, such as automated detection. See the Image Analysis section to learn more.

Vector Quantization for Computer-based Image Pattern Detection

A key challenge in pathology is that it is difficult for pathologists to examine an entire tissue specimen with manual microscopy at high resolution to find rare events or to exhaustively identify significant regions of a biopsy slide. An important benefit of digital pathology is that tissue specimens that are scanned to create digital slide images can be interrogated by computer software at full resolution, including for image pattern recognition. Aperio has patented image pattern recognition technology based on the novel application of vector quantization, a technique commonly used for the compression of data streams. This sophisticated method of pattern recognition is far superior to standard methodologies, and is unique in that it does not rely on prior knowledge of image based features, but rather involves statistical comparisons to imagery data that exhibit characteristics of interest.

Big TIFF Support

This enhancement to the TIFF standard enables image files larger than 4GB to be created and processed, in a backward-compatible fashion. As part of its commitment to open standards, Aperio has donated these enhancements to the public domain, and is working with the TIFF standards body to incorporate them into a future standard release. Until recently TIFF files were limited in size to 4GB, or about 30 gigapixels. With BigTIFF support it is now possible to store images of all sizes, including those larger than 4GB, in the TIFF format.

The libtiff library is an open-source cross-platform library which enables applications software to read and write images stored as TIFF files. A new version of libtiff that supports BigTIFF files has been created by Aperio. The new version is backward-compatible with previous versions and in many cases applications software will not have to change in order to create and process BigTIFF files. Aperio has posted detailed information at http://bigtiff.org/ including an overview of the changes, sample BigTIFF images, source code and library downloads, and technical details.

As a demonstration of the new capabilities of libtiff, Aperio has created the world’s first terapixel image. (1 terapixel = 1 trillion pixels.) This image is over one million pixels wide, and consists of 225 copies of a breast cancer digital slide combined together. This amazing terapixel image was compressed into a TIFF file size of 143GB. The image may be viewed in any standard web browser using Aperio’s image viewing technology at: http://bigtiff.org/terapixel.htm